Since 2010, I also study the cognitive and social behaviour of corvids. I work with a group of social european corvids, the rooks (Corvus frugilegus). I investigated its social dynamics (effect of the loss or addition of new individuals on the network) and the modulations of the characteristics of the network with time (agression, dominance, affiliation, strength of the relationship). I study how these modulations are expressed in this type of society mostly based on pair bonds. This work was at the heart of Palmyre Boucherie and Aïcha Mohamed Benkada, both former PhD students in the team.
Recently, we focused on the vocalisations emitted by the rooks. Rooks do not just “caw” (although they do a lot of that!), they can also emit various types of gargles, sneezes, cackles, and sometimes words (“au revoiiiiiir”). Over the years, we manually counted more than 50 different types of calls. But many of them might just be a slightly different version of a pre-exisiting call. To clarify this, we are developping a machine learning-based classifier to help automatically detect/classify the calls and their sender in our group. We also aim at using this tool for individual/colonial recognition in wild birds.